Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
The unstoppable non-racial force that hastened apartheid’s demise
THE BEGINNING of the end of apartheid from the early 1980s only stimulated greater resistance to it – and no more effectively than in the formation of the United Democratic Front in August 1983.
It was an amalgam of hundreds of different organisations, which made it impossible for the government to kill it off.
As a front, it offered itself as the first major non-racial vehicle of opposition and proved effective in drawing ordinary people behind the demand for an end to apartheid.
This is the Weekend Argus report on its founding. August 20, 1983 5 000 pack UDF rally
A crowd of about 5 000 jammed a Mitchells Plain hall and overflowed outside today for the national launching rally of the United Democratic Front, a political umbrella for a wide spectrum of organisations opposed to the government’s constitutional proposals.
Delegations from many parts of the country converged on the Rocklands Civic Centre for the mass launching of what could become the largest South African political movement in several decades.
The UDF began today with a call on “peace-loving people” to join forces to oppose apartheid.
Mr Frank Chikane, a member of the Transvaal UDF executive, told delegates: “All peaceloving people in South Africa must put their hands together and walk side-by-side to fight against the government’s proposals and the reform propos- als so that we can then destroy the system and put up a government-by-the people so that people shall govern according to the will of the people.”
Mr Chikane said “the struggles of our people” had put so much pressure on the system that apartheid could not contain it anymore”.
His speech was interrupted when the crowd of about 1 500 delegates and official observers rose spontaneously to applaud the arrival of Mrs Helen Joseph, one of the speakers at today’s launch and former secretary-general of the South African Women’s Federation.
Mrs Joseph sat at the main table next to Mrs Martha Mahlangu, the mother of Solomon Mahlangu, who was executed in 1979 following the Goch Street shooting.
The sequel, two decades later, highlighted the disaffection among UDF veterans towards the ruling party when Boesak hit out at the ANC for “broken promises”.
Boesak, who was charged with and found guilty of fraud (in relation to foreign donor funding) in March 1999, was jailed in 2000 and released after serving a year of his three-year sentence. In 2005, it was announced that he had received a presidential pardon and that his criminal record would be expunged. August 20, 2003 Boesak: How I was hung out to dry Ostracised, ignored and discarded. That’s how Struggle hero and co-founder of the UDF Allan Boesak says he’s been treated by the ANC… And that is why he will not celebrate the UDF’s 20th birthday in his home town, Somerset West, today. Flanked by his wife Elna, Boesak said the ANC had also broken its promises to him.
“There are few things that would have given me more pleasure than to be part of these birthday celebrations,” he said. “After all, I called for the formation of the UDF. I was the main speaker at its birth.”
Boesak said the ANC had broken the promise it made before he went to jail that it would take “collective responsibility” for the crimes he was charged with. And this, if the ANC had testified in his defence, could have prevented him from going to jail. Instead, he had branded as having betrayed the Struggle.
“But despite all this, I give thanks for our people… who believed even though they could not see, who sacrificed when they had nothing more to give, dreamed when no one any longer knew how to, who died so that others may live, and saved the soul of a nation.”